Before broadband was common﻿, that modem tone was the gateway to the Internet. But while that grinding sound may remind you of your youth, I'd wager that you probably don't want that part of your life back anytime soon. ﻿

Today, the average download speed is 35Mbps, while the final iteration of modem technology supported transfer speeds of 56Kbps. That makes today's networks about 625 times faster than the old modem connections. ﻿Yet modem technology itself came a long way; those 56Kbps modems are more than 500 times faster than their early ancestors.

The first modems

The first modem to be mass-produced and called a modem (short for "modulator demodulator") was the SAGE modem, deployed in 1958. Designed and built by the US government, the SAGE modem was used in the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), an air defense system built during the Cold War. It connected military bases around the country via teleprinters.

Why did the government need a device that could do this? Modems are designed to transmit digital data over an analog network created in the 19th century to transmit sound – the phone network. In order to transmit information, modems convert it into audio frequencies that can travel long distances without distorting.

The connection tone you heard every time your modem made a connection wasn't there for aesthetic reasons; it was your computer sending data via sound frequencies over analog phone lines and the higher the pitch was, the higher the speed would be.﻿ Once the connection was made, the modem would stop emitting sound – but if you ever picked up an extension while a modem connection was active, you could still hear the sound of data moving across the line.

The SAGE modem could transmit at a rate of only 110bps. If you used a SAGE modem today to download a 5MB song off iTunes, it would take almost five days – 116 hours, 30 minutes, and 30 seconds to be exact – assuming you had a good connection that didn't drop, that is.

﻿﻿Advances, innovations, and the need for speed

Innovations over the next two decades increased modem speeds. The popular Hayes Smartmodem, which was introduced in 1981, offered 300bps throughput. (You might have referred to it as "300 baud," but there's a difference between baud rate and bit rate, and we're going to stick with the more applicable term.) Speeds rose during the '80s, and the 2400bps modem was introduced in 1984. ﻿﻿﻿If you wanted to download a 5MB song over a 2400bps modem, you'd be hitting the play button after a little less than five hours.

Hayes eventually went under in the face of competition from vendors such as USRobotics and Telebit, but modem technology continued to advance. The v.32 standard brought 9600bps speeds, and v.32bis raised that to 14.4Kbps in 1991.

By the time the 56Kbps modem was introduced in 1998, the Internet was in its fledgling stages and broadband service was just becoming available. And that's probably for the best: With a top speed of 56Kbps, the modem pushed the technological limits of transferring information over phone lines. At that rate, it would take about 12 and a half minutes to download a 5MB song.

The modem gives way to the 21st century

The availability of cheap digital networking eventually led to the demise of the old technology that was designed to work over phone networks. Today you can connect to the Internet via cable, fiber optics, satellite, Wi-Fi, or 4G, among other options. With the average download speed in US households pegged at 35Mbps, so it takes slightly more than one second to download a 5MB song.﻿

The average 4G download speed is 14.2Mbps, which is 254 times faster than a 56Kbps modem. When it comes to data transfer, we have it far better than businesses and home users in 1998, when the 56Kbps was considered a fast connection option.

Part of appreciating what we have today is knowing how far we've come﻿.﻿ And we've come a long way –499,999.9Kbps, to be exact, when you compare the SAGE modem with fiber optics.

I remember when I bought my house, the phone wiring was such a mess I would be lucky to get 24k. I put a dedicated line in and pulled a new line across the house, 70ft. to my office, and bingo, 56k. I was so happy.

Nothing like watching the lights blink on an external modem. If they stopped....time to start that file download again. My first internet package was for 20 hours a month, but from midnight to 8am it was unlimited. Lots of late nights.

Not anywhere me, it isn't bucko! The ISP insists that I should be grateful that I can get over 1 meg; 1.3 Mbps to be precise. Even those on the Fibre connection seem to be on less than a third of your average.

Mind you, that is faster than at my last house. On a good day, I could get 0.4 Mbps; on a bad day, it was 0.115 Mbps. Marginally above dial up speed. This was partly due to it being over really old copper, at the far end of the line from the exchange, at just over the maximum theoretical length.

The worst part; I moved from the old house and they promptly arranged to upgrade the cable so that they could offer 10 Mbps.

My first "internet" experience was back in 1993 with AOL 1.0. My IBM PS/1 came with a 2400bps modem, but with AOL it didn't seem that slow. Only when AOL 2.5 came out with a web browser did I realize just how slow my connection was. ^_^

I first connected to a network at 1200 baud on a pulse dial connection. From that point I graduated to a 2400 baud, then a 14.4 kbps modem, then finally to a 56k modem. Shortly after the 56k modem a local telephone company was offering a DSL connection that cost about $100 a month but I didn't really care, I just wanted the always on, high speed connection.

Thanks for the reminder of the painful days at home rather than school. I had been used to dialup speeds until college, where I helped upgrade the network. They were on a 10Mbit LAN at the time, and were upgrading to 100Mbit. Why? Well, the main campus had upgraded their internet connection, and gave the branch campus I was at their OC-3 equipment. Yep, I got to exerience an OC-3 in 1997. I've been a crybaby when using dialup ever since!

I remember playing Counter-strike, Diablo, Diablo 2, Starcraft, and Warcraft 2 Bnet edition all on AOL 56k dialup, anything less than a 48k connection we would re-dial and try for a better connection. If that number kept giving crap, we moved to a different number (AOL), to try connecting, all in all I think my brother and I had about 15-18 local AOL dial in numbers we would cycle through trying for that 48k, the glory day(s) where when we hit 48.8k!! One of our best friends had an ISDN 128k connection, he always beat us in CS.